The Car Crash That Killed Albert Camus on January 4, 1960

Months before his death in an auto accident, Albert Camus wrote in his notebook words that prefigured how he was to end his life:

I don’t sleep all night, fall asleep at 3 AM, wake up at 5 AM, eat a lot, and, beneath the rain, take to the road. I don’t leave the steering wheel for eleven hours—nibbling a biscuit from time to time—and the rain doesn’t leave me either until I reach the Drôme where it lets up a bit over the heights of Nyons so that the scent of lavender comes to me, awakens me, and enlivens my heart.

Ryan Bloom, the editor of the last volume of his Notebooks, sets up the scene:

Struggling with his writing, Camus sent a letter to Catherine Sellers in which he wrote: “To work, one must deprive oneself, and die without aid. So let’s die, because I don’t want to live without working….” On December 30 he wrote a line to Maria Casarès regarding his return to Paris, which, had the line been written in one of his novels, would certainly have seemed to stretch believability: “Let’s say [Tuesday] in principle, taking into account surprises on the road….”

And it was on the road, five days after these words were written—January 4, 1960—that the dashboard clock of Michel Gallimard’s 1959 Facel Vega HK 500 stopped ticking at 1:55 PM. The clock lay in a nearby field. Fragments of the wreckage spread almost 500 feet. A tire sat alone on the scarred cement. Drizzle dotted the road. A black leather valise lay in the mud, tossed next to the tree around which the car was wrapped.

And so died one of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century.